


Parallel Experience

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Category: Jupiter Ascending (2015), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, Crossover, Don’t copy to another site, GFY, Gen, Universe swapping, experimenting with style
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 18:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18504820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: An unexpected switching of places leads to two very different experiences.





	Parallel Experience

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kyleri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyleri/gifts).



> Thank you to Kyleri for instigating this and encouraging it while it was in progress!

He's surrounded by weapons held by strangers, and JARVIS is silent, and his arc reactor is dangerously drained, and this is not going to end well.

* * *

He's in a room as opulent as an Entitled's bower, with five pairs of eyes hard as any Legionnaire's fixed on him, and the visible aftermath of battle all around them. This is already going badly.

* * *

"Where is Captain Apini?" The dark-skinned woman who sounds almost-but-not-quite British, and is one of two without a weapon, speaks. She has some interesting tech on her face - in her face? - and clear command of most of those around him.

She's still not the most dangerous person here, and Tony looks at the other unarmed woman, who is holding back a man who could give Thor and Rogers a run for their money in the built-and-pretty department. Are those pointed ears?

"Probably where I just was."

* * *

"What happened to Stark?" The blond in overly bright red and blue and white has no visible weapon, only a shield, but Stinger isn't foolish enough to think he's not dangerous. A Skyjacker could do a lot with a shield like that, with heft behind it.

Stinger shifts when the red-haired woman moves, flaring his wings out in instinctive reaction to what his subconscious screams is a threat. Especially when everyone else in the room is male, at least as far as he can tell.

"Who's Stark?"

* * *

It takes too many tense minutes to get everyone to stop pointing weapons at him and to get his armor off without JARVIS or any of the tools he uses at home. He doesn't like being without armor, but with no power, he'll be better off without it on him until he can get it fixed. Or until he figures out how to get home. He owes Loki a drink and possibly a punch in the face. With the armor on.

He has a room in the ship - it looks more like something he'd have built on a whim, except for the whole currently in space thing. He can see it out the window, and Legolas out there threatened to throw him out into it. His girlfriend is fortunately less homicidal.

Now, if they'd let him have access to a computer and a workshop, he might be able to figure out how to get home, and get their Captain Bee back to them.

* * *

The large green one is fast and agile as a lycantant, and the shield-bearer would do well in most ground units of the Legion. If they had a truly confined space, they might have posed him a danger, but there's an open window, and in the air, he outclasses them easily.

Hammer-wielder is the one who's a problem, and the storm that shows every sign of responding to his direction. Stinger doesn't know what could do that, but he dives down into the artificial canyons of New York, darting with all the speed of his spliced genes.

He finds a place to hide in one of the buildings that has something he can't even put a name to sprawled against it. All he needs to do is wait for the Keepers or the Aegis to come find him and put him in contact with Jupiter, and this will all be over.

* * *

They're on Titan, drilled into the surface, in a research facility that makes Tony itch to touch everything. Faster-than-light travel from folding space, gravity-skating boots, embedded holographic communications. The whole youth potion made from humans thing is kinda creepy, the insta-healing spray is really awesome, and glowing tattoos that act as signature rubberstamps is both terrifying and so very useful.

That the politics of the whole mess is entirely someone else's problem for a change, and he doesn't have to play nice with people he'd probably prefer to humiliate, is just icing.

He's given a recently unoccupied lab, access to computers with a fantastic holographic interface, and a couple of minions that double as minders. Or maybe the other way around, if you ask them.

Time to get started.

* * *

He doesn't have a chance to rest as much as he likes before the green one and the hammer wielder are trying to dig the creature out to get to him. Stinger has to eel through more enclosed space than he likes before he can get to free air.

It's a week of running and hiding and trying to raise someone, anyone on the com before his pursuers catch up with him. They shouldn't have the means to track his communications, but he's certain they have when he gets a response that isn't Legion, Aegis, or the Keepers.

They catch him outside the city with some whisper-quiet flying explosive, knocking him from the air despite his speed, and take him back to where he began from. Only this time, they close him in a room without windows, whose walls hum with electric circuits and leave a chemical profile like steel in the air that coats his tongue like sugar syrup.

He'll have to wait for them to make a mistake.

* * *

His minders learn quickly they have to remind him to eat, and drag him out of the lab to sleep, or he'll go days on snacks and catnaps. Floating to sleep gives him nightmares, but the bed is acceptable once that aspect is turned off. The food is good, even when he compares it to his favorite chef's creations. Or the memory of them. He still would rather have something from home.

Six months it takes him to figure out how to reverse-engineer the accident that brought him here. It might have taken him less if he weren't trying to horde as much information as he could about the tech surrounding him as possible. Just one of their sheaves full of whatever he could record. Just one. He'll take what he can of the fields he's not well-versed in, and memorize the specs on the tech.

With all of that, now he just needs a way to recreate the accident, and get himself home. Return whoever he'd accidentally replaced, and hope he can pick up the pieces his life at home may well be in. If time is passing the same there. He doesn't know if he hopes it is, or hopes it isn't.

* * *

Two months of waiting, before they try to transfer him elsewhere, maybe to study him, maybe just to keep him imprisoned, he doesn't care. It's an opportunity, and he takes the chance. Leaves his boots, his mauler, even his armor behind. Shuts down his com-unit hard, since it can be traced otherwise. Bolts at speed - there's no storm to slow him, no explosive to catch him - until he loses his pursuers.

Then he drops to the ground, folds his wings in tight, and finds a place to acquire a jacket and a hat and a bit of cash. Takes the train out of the city, and finds a place surrounded by shorn fields and autumn-bright woods to hunker down and wait. This place isn't the Earth he knows, but it is still Earth, and he still knows how to survive here.

He moves on after a week, heading west toward the more familiar environs around Chicago. Autumn freezes into winter, and he slows down. Stays out of the cities, away from the major highways. The year is turning when he makes it to the shorn fields of corn that he knows as well as he does his own gear. Soon, he hopes. Soon.

* * *

"I can do this from here. Well, from orbit." Tony doesn't think setting this off on a planet is the best idea. Even if the other end is on a planet anyway. The energy output is enough that he's not sure how the ship he landed on was in one piece after. Or if his tower back home is in one piece.

"And it will bring Stinger back when it sends you home?" Jupiter is looking at the small device sitting in the middle of Tony's workbench with something between trepidation and hope.

Tony hesitates. He can't know for certain until they can set it off. "Unless it just displaces the entire ship from here to there." At which point, he just needs to recreate this whole thing, only with him not on board, and this Stinger person actually on board, and that should send them all home safely.

Or as safely as he can manage. This is at the limits of his knowledge as it is, and he doesn't like the feeling that he might fail. Again.

Jupiter watches him for a long moment before she nods once, decision made. "Let's see if it works."

* * *

Winter is beginning to thaw, and the first new flowers are starting to poke their shoots through the ground. He'd holed up in an abandoned barn that sits where he has a house, sleeping beneath the combs of a large hive. They're not the bees of home, but he can still communicate with them, and he only has to go out to get a little food so he doesn't take too much honey. 

No one comes. Not those who tried to hold him, not the Legion, not the Aegis, not his Queen. It's eight months since he found himself far from where he should be, in the wreckage of a battle that should never have happened, surrounded by people who should not exist.

"This isn't the best place for someone to take up residence in."

The bland voice makes him flare his wings, turning and taking a step forward to put himself between the suited stranger and the hive. It's all he has to defend now.

There's a long moment of silence, the two of them watching each other, Stinger tensed to fight or flee, the stranger weirdly relaxed.

"I stand corrected." A pause. "Phil Coulson, SHIELD."

* * *

His armor is remaining behind. He didn't repair it while he was focused on how to get home, and without JARVIS, it's not going to work right. With the new tech he's bringing home, he thinks he can make a suit with an integrated AI that doesn't need connection to servers on the ground. And even if he can't, he can certainly use the knowledge he's picked up on nanites and making suits from them that pack into a small space. Their emergency space suits are fantastic.

He's already picked up one of their integrated com units that also provides instant access to a broad range of information. It was useful to finish the device he's setting off in less than an hour, and he's already thinking of ways to tie it into JARVIS and the tower. Possibly make them for the rest of the Avengers. If they're still together. If they're still a team.

Fuck, he hopes they are.

"Whenever you're ready, Mr. Stark." Diomika's voice is steady on the com, and Tony draws a deep breath, stretching his hands before he reaches out to set off the displacer. Watching the world blink and stretch before it settles again. Sorta.

* * *

There's not enough time to give Coulson his name, even if he were inclined to do so before something changes. Tilting and shifting, and he stumbles while the bees hum an agitated chorus behind him. Watches Coulson do the same, and reach for the weapon at his side, as he hadn't done when confronting Stinger.

The world settles, but not the way it should. It looks like someone attempted to merge the old barn with a modern - modern beyond Earth - laboratory. There's a stranger in the room with them, blinking rapidly.

"Fury said you were dead." The man's voice is distorted, but not entirely unintelligable, and he's staring at Coulson.

"I was told the same about you, Stark." Coulson is staring right back, Stinger apparently forgotten.

"Not exactly." Stark shakes his head, the movement seeming to stutter and blur, making Stinger's head ache, before he looks away from Coulson. Straight at Stinger. "I'm trying to get us both home."

"What do I need to do?" Stinger might regret trusting Stark later, but so long as he gets home, he doesn't care.

* * *

This isn't how it was supposed to happen, but he can make it work. If it didn't work with just him, maybe. "The black box with the bright red button. Push the button."

Anything else can wait, including what Coulson is doing there, and how he's alive. Watching the nausea-induing movement of Stinger as he comes closer, reaching a hand that doesn't seem to quite look right (he doesn't have the words for how it looks wrong) to touch the one thing that is clear in this... in-between space.

The world explodes in dazzling light and deafening sound.

* * *

He wakes up in a familiar bed, with the welcome hum of _his_ hives all around him, feeling like he's been scraped raw inside and out, and possibly turned inside out and back again in the process. Stinger turns his head, seeing Kiza sprawled on a cot next to his bed, like she'd refused to leave him alone while he was unconscious. Beyond her, Jupiter's feet are on the end of the cot, while she naps in a chair. And Caine at the door, leaning against the frame so he can watch both the room and the hallway.

"How long?" His voice is rougher than usual, and even he can barely hear himself. Caine still catches the words, and turns his head enough to watch him for a long moment.

"Eight months. And four days." How long he was gone, and how long he's been home, unconscious.

Too long, but it doesn't matter. He's home.

* * *

"Mr. Stark?"

"Is that shrapnel in his face?"

_"Phil?"_

"How long until that bee person gets here to take care of the hive?"

Tony can identify Romanov, Rhodey, Pepper, and Happy by their voices, though it takes a moment to figure out that the other noise he's hearing isn't in his head, but surrounding him. He drags his eyes open to see a cloud of bees between him and the bright blue sky that is where he thinks a roof is supposed to be.

"Ow."

It feels like he's gone several rounds with one of those Chitauri leviathans, and then taken another missile into space and fallen back home again. At least he's intact, he thinks, and after that experience Tony should probably double check.

"Tony!" That's Pepper, and he tries to shove himself upright, only to drop back to the ground with a groan.

"Ok. Not getting up yet." Tony pauses, watching the bees swirl above him, some drifting lower before darting back to the main swarm. "I'm fine, Pep."

For certain values of fine that include being _home_ again. Any injuries will heal, feeling like he was pummeled will get better. And he has all sorts of new knowledge and technology to integrate into his suits and into Rhodey's armor, and something for Romanov and for Coulson and for Pepper and for Happy. For those who found him.

The bees swirl above him again, and a few come down and actually land on his face, and it tickles until they take off again. It's weird. He'll figure it out later.

He's home.


End file.
